Baja - "Aloha Ahab"

Baja - A River Splits Love and Spits Out Bones (Arctic Rodeo 2007)

Baja – Aloha Ahab / Arctic Rodeo

As much as I hate to say it, the most refreshing music is near always poured from unexpected sources. Listening to music you have heard time and time again by your utmost favorite artists is more giving in to your comfort zone than trying to revitalize your ears. For me at least, to truly replenish those weary, jaded eardrums, and really reinvigorate my interest in the entire medium of sound manipulation, I have to explore completely unknown territory, listen to an artist I know absolutely nothing about or just blindly start pulling music from the shelf. Thankfully, working in the music department of the independent radio business presents me with multiple bins of unknown sounds on a weekly basis, almost to an annoying degree at times. But unearthing that one mysterious gem from the mound of manila madness makes the entire process completely worth it every time. That inspired jubilation is exactly what happened when I stumbled upon the German sound designer Daniel Vujanic last January and his two-sided debut on the wrongfully unheralded Belgian label Stilll Records. Maps/Systemalheur consisted of seventy minutes of melodic excursions throughout a series of touchstones in experimental folk, post-rock, jazz and electronica broken into two separate parts: forty minutes of cut-and-paste experimental prog-folk followed by a half-hour of jazzy post-rock. Granted Vujanic wasn’t tapping into any particular sound that had not been tweaked before, but he had a refreshing approach to the music that very much reminded me of the reason we are continuously digging so whole-heartedly for new music.

When I got an email from Daniel a few weeks back letting me know he was shipping me his sophomore effort, I was both excited and impressed; two albums in only six months apart? Nice. Maybe we’ll have to start dropping the prolific tag with his name. And even better, when his second full-length of 2007, Aloha Ahab, finally made its way stateside and started spinning in my CD player, it sounded nothing like his previous release. Instead of the swirling tunnel of pieced together chamber music that made up Maps/Systemalheur, Aloha Ahab is a soothing ray of melodic sunshine pop more interested in swooning than spurring challenges. Don’t get me wrong though, if this album proves anything, it is that Vujanic is an ambitious sound designer above all else. Because surrounding the lulling hooks and delicate melodic interplay are continuously shifting song structures, heavily manipulated instrumentation and interweaving found sounds (which according to the liner notes were captured throughout Pula, Copenhagen, Venezia, Prijedor, Bayonne, Stuttgart, Berlin, Cabarete and Kuala Lumpur). This is rippling, stuttering pop music with as much emphasis on plucking your desire for easily accessible melodies as it places on surrounding them with as much accentuating musical quirks as possible.

The most surprising new characteristic of Aloha Ahab is that Vujanic has found his voice, which was completely absent from his previous release. Unassuming and comforting, the vocals help create more of a storybook narrative to accompany the pleasant interlacing tones. I am personally a bit partial to the instrumental tracks, but when he starts manipulating the vocals in the same manner as he does the instrumentation, I believe the combination excels. For example, “From Slogan to Spectacle” features both Vujanic and his wife/sister(?) Mariana trading simple lines that become increasingly interweaved in between near schizophrenic ambient conversation, or during “European Pillows” where the soft-spoken lyrics ever so slightly stutter beneath lush acoustic guitar melodies increasingly being manipulated by echo and vocoder like effects. And most surprisingly, Tim Kinsella of Joan of Arc/Make Believe/Cap’n Jazz/Owls fame shows up for an extremely brief vocal interlude during the shimmering two-minute piece “Gibraltar Sequence.” I wonder what the story is behind that collaboration. The instrumental numbers are my personal go-to points though, like “A River Splits Love and Spits Out Bones” (which in all honesty features a guitar part that would not at all be out of place in a Joan of Arc song), which blossoms with dueling clarinets, horns and sparse electronic twinges, or “Waterthreads,” which utilizes a ridiculous amount of instrumentation continuously passing off the melody for a song clocking in less than three minutes.

Aloha Ahab is sequenced perfectly between the instrumental and vocal-led numbers with only two songs actually surpassing the four-minute mark, which is another striking difference between this sophomore effort and the sprawling Maps/Systemalheur. And to be completely honest, I was slightly taken aback with my first impression of the complete package between the album’s near-Chill Out artwork and the opening indie-pop track. But in the end, Vujanic won out, and I was once again very impressed by his output, perhaps to an even higher degree now that I know he is more than a one-trick pony. And get this! I got another email from Daniel this morning saying he just wrapped his third album of the year(!), not to mention he described it as “Scandinavian blackmetaltronica.” Whoa. The man is prolific. You better believe I’ll be checking that one out on the wonderful day it arrives in my mailbox, though I might have to pass it off to Dave to actually review.